For me, when it comes to languages, the deader the better. I know Ancient Greek and Latin very well. I tried to do Egyptian hieroglyphs on my own and came to appreciate my students’ struggles more. I did ancient Hebrew as an intensive course (even read the Book of Jonah in the original), but would need to start from scratch if I picked it up again (which would be great to do). I have Akkadian, Sumerian, and Hittite on my language bucket list. But my current one is Sanskrit.
I had done an intro the Sanskrit alphabet and culture as an intersession class. I was just barely ahead of the students. Then I did a more serious self-study of it during a couple of summers. But each fall, as school started up, it would drop by the wayside. This year, however, I have a student who’s doing an independent study of it with me, so I am thus externally motivated not to let it be pushed aside.
While my knowledge of Greek and Latin really help, I do highly recommend The Cambridge Introduction to Sanskrit, which has some great video resources to accompany it (which I really should use more, to help my pronunciation). My goal is to read the Ramayana in the original. One year when I was teaching “Heroic Epics” in the Classics Department and a colleague was teaching South Asian Epics in the Religion Department, we did some cross lectures and I read up on the Ramayana as part of that and was hooked.
Ramblings 